DIssertation

My dissertation, “The Politics of Prioritization: How Twitter Reflects Senators’ Attention,” offers a new framework for explaining how politicians prioritize attention and make trade offs among those priorities. Just as a legislature will choose to address some issues and ignore others, individual politicians make similar calculations that have implications on representation and the policy process. I explain patterns in senators’ issue attention by linking their relationships with their party, their constituency, and the institution to the attention they divide and trade-off among their many priorities. I test the empirical implications of this model using original data from senators’ Twitter communications. By building a complex understanding of what influences the attention trade-offs senators make between politics and representation, I discover two findings. First, policy priorities are both a function of institutional roles — such as committee leadership — and the trade-off in constituent priorities. Committee leaders who prioritize policy have less time and attention to spend on constituent issues. Second, the heightened partisan climate produces asymmetrical patterns of partisan priorities. Republican senators are more likely than Democrats to prioritize politics and more likely to use negative, attack-oriented rhetoric on Twitter.